Hyper-V : Windows Server 2003 VM - Where is my network card?
February 18, 2008 – 7:28 pmThere are plenty of articles out there explaining how to install the Hyper-V and get a Windows Server 2008 VM up and running. One such article is Virtual PC Guy’s weblog (Here).
What if you want to get a Windows Server 2003 VM up and running? One thing to bear in mind is that a Windows Server 2003 VM will not have the drivers for the virtual NIC straight out of the bag. To pick up the drivers you need to install the Hyper-V integration components. If you have created your VM with an ISO or CD that is pre SP2 then you are going to run into issues. You’ll have no NIC and you will not be able to install the integration components. Why? See the image below.
No network card without the Hyper-V integration components, no Hyper-V integration components without SP2, no network card to download or copy SP2.
So how do you get around this issue? Well, there are a few options but perhaps the easiet way is to create an ISO with SP2 on it.
Tools for the job:
- Windows 2003 SP2 which can be found here
- Something to create the ISO with. I used NBXSoft - Free Create-Burn ISO which worked nicely on the x64 Windows Server 2008 host.
What next?
- Create your ISO and attach the VMs CD drive to it
- Install Windows 2003 SP2 and reboot
- Try and install the Integration Services again from the Action menu
If there are any problems detecting hardware try removing it from Device Manager and bouncing the VM.
Note: You wont run into this issue with a Windows Server 2008 VM as the integration components are built in.
4 Responses to “Hyper-V : Windows Server 2003 VM - Where is my network card?”
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By orchard banks on Jun 5, 2008
I think you could also add a legacy network adapter and get network connectivity on a pre-Win2003 SP2 server that way. Also, you could take an hard drive offline on the Hyper V host server and add that drive as a physical drive on the VM. The physical drive could have your SP2 files.
By Mike on Aug 7, 2008